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Crystal Growth Lab

The Crystal Growth Lab @ FAU headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Wellmann is located at the Electronic Materials and Energy Technology (i-meet) division of the Materials Department (Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg) and at the Center of Advanced Materials and Processes (ZMP). The research activities are devoted to modern topics in semiconductor technology and include crystal growth, epitaxy and characterization of various electronic materials with special emphasis on wide bandgap semiconductors.

Since December 2017 the successful activities of Crystal Growth Lab are listed by the European Union as a Key Enabling Technology (KET) Centre on „FAU – Industrial Services in Crystal Growth of SiC“.

The R&D activities of the Crystal Growth Lab lie in the areas of materials for power electronics, energy saving & novel photonic applications with a major focus on the semiconductor SiC:

• SiC for power electronic devices is a key player for energy saving. The lab focuses on bulk of SiC using the PVT method and the newly developed CS-PVT process.
• SiC for novel photonics includes applications like optical waveguides, quantum information, intermediate bandgap solar cells, photocatalytic water splitting and fluorescent SiC. The lab focuses on bulk like materials and thin films processed using the CS-PVT process as well as Chemical Vapor Deposition.
• The lab environment covers all processing steps from the synthesis of the SiC source material, the crystal growth process of SiC boules and thin films, grinding and wafering, as well as wafer inspection.
• In the field of semiconductor characterization, a large variety of electrical, spectroscopic and structural techniques are used which serve the better understanding of materials processing. Special emphasis is put on topographic/mapping methods.
• As a future material system, the synthesis and layer deposition of chalcogenide perovskites like BaZrS3, BaZrSe3, BaSrS3, BaSrSe3 are investigated.
• Other topics investigated in the lab include (i) ammonothermal growth of nitride semiconductors like GaN, (ii) CIGSSe and CZTSSe thin film solar cell materials recently, (iii) printed electronic layers using nanoparticles and hybrid organic semiconductor & nanoparticle composites, (iv) hybrid nanomagnet-semiconductor structures, (v) rare earth doped semiconductors and (vi) semiconductor superlattices and quantum dot structures.

In all fields service for industrial and institutional partners are provided.